The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 34

She stared at him; probing behind the protective Perspex veneer of his gla.s.ses. Was she wondering how he knew? Van den Bergen had clearly not yet told the full story of Ad's frank exchange with Danny Boy.

'Ad, I don't-'

'Why don't you start with Danny? Tell me about Danny, Ella.' He made sure his voice dripped thickly with sarcasm.

George grabbed Ad's hand, but he pulled it away; put it out of her reach beneath his blanket. She looked at his neck, spiky with days' worth of black stubble. Her eyes would not meet his now.

'Look at me! Tell me about Danny,' he demanded.

Her voice was small and thin. 'He was the one who told me where you were,' she said. 'He broke into my room and left a note with the killer's address on it. Said he saw you. He felt bad about what Jez had done.'

Ad looked up at the ceiling, willing himself to keep the hurt inside. But he was beyond that now. 'Danny Boy didn't seem so charitable when he blew a hole in my foot.'

George looked at Ad askance. 'He shot you? I thought-'

Ad folded his arms. 'What were his words again before he pulled the trigger? They were charming. Oh, yes. "Cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d. No one f.u.c.ks my bird."'

Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes. 'I'm not his bird. I'm your bird.'

'You're not "my bird".' He did the inverted commas with the fingers of his left hand. His resentment was tart and tangible and he wanted it that way now. 'You're a convict and a liar. For Christ's sake, George, I love you but you lied to me! I fell in love with a lie.'

George's chin dimpled up.

'I had no choice.' Suddenly, her voice was low and calm. She enunciated every word correctly. It was like somebody had flipped a switch. 'I was an informant in a big drugs case. I was given a new ident.i.ty and signed the Official Secrets Act. I couldn't tell you. Don't you see?'

He stared at her, watching her lips move, hearing sound, but struggling to piece together the sense in the outlandish things she was saying.

Her back stiffened. 'And I'm not a convict,' she said. 'I was mistakenly put on remand for months because my CID contact had a heart attack the same day I was supposed to get busted and taken into protective custody. It was a c.o.c.k-up.'

Now she was pointing at him. The vulnerability had gone. Ad sensed a subtle shift in power from himself, the injured victim, to her.

'Don't punish me for things you don't understand nothing about.' In place of declarations of relief and love, in place of the deadpan delivery of cold, hard fact, here was an outpouring of concrete-jungle att.i.tude. All her skeletons were now tumbling out of her hand-fashioned, flimsy closet.

Ad felt his face succ.u.mb to the vice-like grip of a pained expression.

'But how could you be with that man?' he asked. 'With him? He's a thug and a drug dealer. He plucks his eyebrows!'

George stood up. Impatient, fists balled. He was shocked.

'I met you in September,' she shouted. 'I've known you for less than a year. I will not seek your approval for the things I've done in the past which are of no concern to you, in the same way that I do not give a monkey's flying a.r.s.ehole about you poking the Aryan Milkmaid since you were sixteen.'

He was confused. Drowning in contrition. Ad knew he was not a natural candidate for flint-faced, steel-hand-in-a-velvet-glove c.r.a.p. 'George, sit back down. Please.'

Backing away. Backing towards the door. He knew her well enough to see she was building the bricks back up one by one. The wall grew quickly in height around her, shutting him out.

'You saw Jez,' she said. 'He's a monster. You should know why it was important I tried to bring him down. That psycho tortured me and my mother for years before any of this. Back in London. Back in a life you wouldn't begin to comprehend.'

She approached a table holding neat, overspill rows of get well soon cards from Ad's family and college friends. With one swipe from her arm, she knocked them to the ground. She walked out of the hospital room without a backwards glance.

'Come back!' Ad shouted.

'f.u.c.k you!' she yelled as she marched down the corridor.

He had never thought she would say that to him.

'What the h.e.l.l did you think you were doing?' Kamphuis yelled.

The door to Kamphuis' office was shut, but van den Bergen knew Elvis and Marie would be listening outside in the open-plan s.p.a.ce, straining to catch the inevitable bellowed threats from Kamphuis. That kind of schadenfreude was a perk of their job.

Kamphuis thumped the desk. 'How often do I have to say it? You're an embarra.s.sment to the department!'

Van den Bergen sat comfortably, with his right leg folded over his left knee, in the deliberately low seat opposite Kamphuis. It had been a week good enough to make him smile.

'Oh, now, Olaf, I think you're exaggerating. You'd never have let me go to England if I had asked. We both know that. Not at such short notice and not on a hunch.'

'I might have.'

'Really?' He leaned in towards Kamphuis, feeling like today, he wanted to step right over the line. Just for fun. 'You furnish your office with original works of art. You take home a better salary than anyone else at your level but you query the cost of a new set of tyres on a patrol car or overtime payments for a surveillance team. Don't make me laugh. Look, I've won you a truck-load of kudos for your department.' He ruffled his white hair and started to bounce his shoe up and down for good measure. 'Just be grateful.'

Today van den Bergen had worn basketball boots into the office because not only was he feeling like a younger man with a spring in his step, he also knew Kamphuis detested the sight of middle-aged men in youthful clothing or footwear.

'Grateful? Arrogant son of a b.i.t.c.h! You think this is all down to you and you alone?' Kamphuis narrowed his eyes at van den Bergen and toyed with his naked lady statue.

'Well, you were the one that doggedly wanted to pursue the Islamist terror cell angle to keep the top bra.s.s and the media happy. If I hadn't hooked up with Georgina and kept an open mind, we might never have found our man. But you're right. It isn't just down to me. My team, Dirk and Marie, were excellent ...'

'You're no team player, Paul. You wouldn't know that kind of caring, sharing c.r.a.p if it came up and punched you on the nose.'

'...as was Marianne de Koninck and her forensics people and Dieter Mann, my colleague in Heidelberg. It's been a triumph of teamwork between disciplines and countries. All pulling together. Despite weak management above me.'

Yes, van den Bergen was enjoying himself. He had a meeting with lovely Marianne later on. They were going to discuss eighteen severed fingers, eleven missing persons' cases and six unsolved dead Jane and John Does over a working lunch.

That afternoon, while forensics were still combing Saddiq's country home for the flotsam and jetsam of death that would tie him to the victims, Elvis and Marie would continue to examine the computer hard drives that had been found in the house.

At three o'clock, he had scheduled a conference call with his old narcotics boss, his opposite number in vice, some bigwigs in Scotland Yard and someone high up in the German Federal Intelligence Service to discuss links between the Firestarter case and the trafficking of illegal, underage prost.i.tutes and Cla.s.s A drugs from Afghanistan via Germany, then Amsterdam to the UK. Daniel Spencer was at the top of his 'to do' list.

'Do you know what, Olaf?' van den Bergen asked. 'I think I might be asked to head up this new multi-national, drugs and people-trafficking task-force. Don't you?'

Kamphuis snorted.

'And perhaps I'll accept.'

'You don't have it in you,' Kamphuis said.

'Ooh, I don't know,' van den Bergen said. 'I think they're looking to recruit someone on the strength of good police work and nothing more. No a.r.s.e-kissing at fancy fundraising dinners. No back room politics with brandy and cigars.'

'I want a formal apology for your insubordination,' Kamphuis said, pointing and spitting slightly.

Van den Bergen levered himself out of the child-sized chair, straightened out his six-foot-five frame, clicked his hip back into place noisily and smiled at Kamphuis.

'Go f.u.c.k yourself, Olaf.'

He had always wanted to say that.

George read the email from Sally three times as she chewed at a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich made with stale bread.

'd.a.m.n you, Sally,' she finally said to the laptop screen.

She looked around her room with an ache in her heart. Unexpectedly, what had seemed such a beautiful, seedy, hidden gem had now become a fallible prison. Danny and Jez had both defiled her sacred s.p.a.ce with their sinister acts of trespa.s.s and subtle intimidation. Matches and notes. There wasn't much difference, was there?

No, Sally was right. She was no longer safe in Jan's attic. She had to go.

George stood and walked over to the photograph of her and Ad outside the Rijksmuseum; an optimistic time, heartbreakingly in the past now and buried beneath a mountain of hurt.

'How do I break the news to Jan and the girls?' she asked the smiling, two-dimensional Ad. 'And what about me and you?'

In the hospital lift, George agonised over what she would say to Ad. Twelve hours later now. Had she given him long enough to think? Did he want a stake in her future?

The lift doors opened. George nervously tapped her cigarette packet in her coat pocket. She walked along the corridor to Ad's room and was surprised to see him fully dressed in jeans and a cable-knit sweater, although still wearing a cast on his foot with a bandage over his head and hand. His mother was fussing around him, packing his things into a small suitcase.

George was already inside the room. There was no walking away now.

Ad looked at her, at first with a glimmer of naked glee, which he quickly masked with a thin-lipped nod.

His mother spun around. She eyed George with undisguised disgust before pointedly turning back to the suitcase.

'I'm just going to get something from the car,' she said to Ad. 'I'll be back in a few minutes. I'll leave you with your ... cla.s.smate.'

They were alone.

'Look, about before,' Ad began.

George approached him and put her finger on his lips, gently. 'It's okay. We can just start fresh.'

Ad picked up his reefer jacket from the day chair next to his bed. He held it like a barrier between them. 'No, George. We can't just start fresh.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, you and me. I can't do it.'

The moments of intimacy they had shared flashed quickly by in George's mind. The meals he had cooked for her. The long afternoons they had spent together, talking, laughing, putting the world to rights. The kisses and the unspent pa.s.sion they had s.n.a.t.c.hed in the midst of all that horror. The case that they had both risked so much to help solve.

'How could you walk away from all we have?' she asked, feeling tears spill onto her cheeks.

'What have we got? Nothing!' he said, pushing her hand away. 'Whatever we had was built on a lie.'

George realised then that she had brought a kingdom of empty promises crashing down at his feet. She allowed regretful tears to flow easily. Watched how Ad's eyes became gla.s.sy with emotion.

'Come on, Ad,' she said. 'This is ridiculous. We've got something special. Anyway, what will you do? You're going to see me every day at lectures. Are you going to ignore me? Are you going to jettison our friendship?'

'I'm dropping out for the rest of the year. I need to get well, you know? I'm going home to Groningen.'

'No,' George mouthed.

Ad pushed his tear-splashed gla.s.ses up his nose and started to pull his jacket on, as if he wasn't crying; as if this conversation wasn't taking place. 'You should go now,' he said, turning his back on her; starting to shut his case with his left hand.

His rejection felt like a stinging slap. This isn't how it was meant to turn out! George could feel her dignity and hope slipping away. After all she had been through, she had somehow turned into the bad guy. It wasn't fair. Walk away, before he breaks your heart.

Her heart overruled her brain.

'I love you!' she said.

Her declaration was met with deafening silence.

Chapter 34.

Dominican Republic, 27 February

Danny was woken by the discreet buzz of his BlackBerry. It journeyed across the mahogany nightstand, buoyed by its persistent vibrations, telling him to answer. Danny was quickly alert. Saw from the glowing display that it was Rodriguez. He picked up.

'I've got the perfect guy for you,' Rodriguez said, wrapping his Columbian tongue clumsily around the English words. 'He's willing to travel. We can meet later.'

Danny glanced at the young Dominican girl who lay sleeping between the 400 count Egyptian cotton sheets. He didn't want to have this conversation in front of her. In fact, if Rodriguez's guy didn't have what he needed, there was no point even in meeting.

'Does he speak Arabic?'

There was a pause and a quick exchange in Spanish at the other end of the line.

'No.'

'Then he's not the guy for me. And, Rodriguez ...'

'Yes?'

'Don't chat this s.h.i.t on the f.u.c.king phone with me, man.'

He hung up, swung his legs out of the emperor-sized bed. Admired his six pack in the mirror. Looking good. He pulled on some Calvin Klein shorts and strapped on his diamond-studded, custom-made Breitling Avenger watch before the girl got any wise ideas about pocketing it.